It is no secret that to grab the attention of your target audiences you must understand their needs. You as an advertiser must be aware of what they are interested in, what is their age and demographics, how they interact with your brand and what is their level of engagement. Programmatic advertising technologies enhance this process and enable advertisers to analyze vast amounts of data received from their audiences. As a result advertisers get better insight into their consumers' buying habits - at what time they tend to visit the website, are they interested in a particular product or are they just browse around, etc. Building such detailed profiles of your audiences will help you construct better targeted campaigns.

2. Communicate with them on the right channels.

Part of understanding your consumers behaviour is to know where to find them. Every website and every social platform has its own specific audience. If you want to target teenagers between 15 and 17 it might not be a good idea to use LinkedIn. In the same time you don’t have to focus on one or two channels specifically. With programmatic buying you can be flexible enough to have multiple campaigns targeted at different groups of consumers with different interests using different channels. The trick to make the most of this option is to tailor your message to be unique for each of your audience groups.

3. Personalize your message.

Remember the knowledge you’ve gathered on your consumers? Here is where you make practical use of it. One of the strongest features of programmatic advertising is that allows you to personalize your message in accordance to your consumers interests and engage with them in real time. You must’ve heard about the programmatic motto - the right message to the right person at the right moment. To illustrate this - let’s say you’re a shoe selling website and you have a few autumn offers for male boots coming up. Thanks to the investigation/data gathering you did beforehand, you now know that young men in London between 20 and 25 are more interested in one particular style of boots than in others. The next thing you do is to make sure to engage with them with the sale offer for those exact boots which perfectly matches their interest.

4. Don’t be a stalker.

You have shown the personalized ad and you have gained serious traffic on your website. But some people haven’t purchased the boots so you continue to engage with them hoping to not lose the hot trail. Keeping the spark of interest is no doubt an important part of any advertising strategy. However if misused, it might cause negative effects. Programmatic buying is especially powerful when it comes to retargeting and sometimes this could be addictive. So be careful not to set your campaign to follow your target consumer on every channel, every hour and every day after they’ve expressed interest to your offer. Otherwise you risk to get the wrong type of consumer attention.